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Drupal or WordPress: does it matter?

If you’re having a new website built for your business, one of the most important decisions you’ll need to make is which content management system (CMS) to use.

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August 7, 2018

The CMS is the software program used to create and maintain your website, as well as keep it secure. The right CMS for your business will be the one that best meets your needs not only in relation to the look and functionality of your website, but also in the way you want to manage the website ‘behind the scenes’.

Drupal and WordPress are two of the most popular systems used by developers, and at Joyer we create websites in both. However, with our many years’ experience in developing solutions for clients in different programming languages and frameworks, we now encourage our clients towards choosing Drupal as our preferred CMS.

Here’s why we prefer Drupal:

Drupal was built by developers for developers

Many people choose WordPress because they can use it themselves to design their own website, or have a developer whip something up quickly. Originally set up as a blogging platform, it’s a reasonably basic system and is often used by people in creating their own websites at home. However, this is also one of its biggest limitations – it’s too simple.

Drupal is a more complex system, which is a good thing when it comes to website structure and functionality. Because it was designed by developers, for use by developers – not home-users with limited technical understanding - it has a much broader capacity. What this means is, while you’ll need a developer to build your site using Drupal, you’ll get a system which, in the end, works more efficiently and is much easier for end users to manage.

Drupal gives you more flexibility

Put simply - with Drupal, you can create whatever you want. On top of this, there are a whole lot extra benefits because it is designed as an enterprise framework – in other words, because it’s designed to suit large and complex websites, it has the capacity to do a lot more than WordPress.

For example, there’s flexibility around levels of access and permissions, content workflows and moderation of your website, as well as better security and better overall performance. You can also customise administrator interfaces to suit the different technical expertise levels of users.

In a nutshell, there’s really no limit to what can be created using Drupal – whereas the capabilities of WordPress are limited due to the nature of the framework.

Drupal allows for tailored solutions, not just templates

Our client service ethos is to create solutions that uniquely suit the needs of our clients. For this reason, we prefer not to use templates or cut and paste designs. While the vast library of pre-made templates and plugins available through WordPress may appeal to the business looking for a quick, pre-fill option, we prefer to build our website solutions to fit each business’s unique requirements in line with their brand, target audience and ‘back end’ user needs.

WordPress websites can often be easily identified because they look similar, with slight differences in colour, text or images. WordPress is more of a fill-in-the-blanks solution, whereas Drupal gives developers the tools to create a custom and optimised solution – a bit like the difference between a colouring-in page and a blank page, in terms of creating an artwork.

Drupal is more user-friendly for content editors

Whether you’re a small business owner, or responsible for web content in a larger organisation, chances are you’re not a technical expert or skilled in writing code. WordPress has five basic user role options included, but if you require something that doesn’t fit the mould, you’re stuck.

Drupal has the capacity for customising the user admin experience based on the skills of the user and the content requirements of the business. This can be individualised per user, so that you can allow varied access, varied capacity to update, and any combination required. A huge benefit of this is that you minimise the risk that someone with administrator access can accidentally break your website.

Drupal has a higher level of security

Traditionally, WordPress has been more vulnerable to hackers, whereas Drupal is considered to have a higher level of security – a reason why many governments use Drupal for their website, including the Australian Government (see more information here: www.govcms.gov.au).

However, no matter which software platform you use, it’s crucial to apply security updates as they become available.

But what about cost? While you will get a better solution with Drupal, you will typically have to pay more to have a developer create a Drupal website – when compared to having a WordPress developer install and customise a WordPress theme.

However, to help manage cost, at Joyer we’ve created a baseline Drupal package which includes certain ‘back end’ website functionalities that have been pre-built and can be quickly customised to suit your needs. This allows us to save costs for our clients because it saves significant time in building the non-visible side of your website. We can then focus on building a unique look and feel for your front-end website rather a using a template.

Ultimately, our aim is to give clients access to all the advantages that Drupal provides without the significant additional costs. If you’d like to chat to us more about this, please give us a call.